Juicy and Tender, Seitan Is Quite Possibly the Best Fake Meat -- But There Is a Downside

What if the next big thing to revolutionize the lives of vegans and vegetarians was waiting in the wings? What if this next big thing was amazingly high in protein, amazingly low in fat and carbs, relatively low in sodium, and cholesterol-free, yet with a taste and texture more like real meat than any other analogue ever devised? What if the next big thing was chewy and exuded meaty juices and sometimes even required a knife to cut?

Imagine, then, its power as a secret weapon to convert carnivores and to solace those guilt-ridden vegans and vegetarians who still dream of bacon, brisket, sloppy joes, beef Stroganoff, souvlaki, pepperoni, pigs-in-blankets, corned-beef hash and chicken drumsticks: things that tofu cannot replicate, not even with the best imagination in the world.

Tofu is not God's gift to herbivores, though this feels blasphemous to say. It's slippery. It rushes down the throat so bland and unobtrusive as to be the gastronomical equivalent of an apology. It's also made of soybeans. And while at least one recent Journal of the American Medical Association report credits soy foods with reducing the risk of death and recurrence among breast-cancer patients, soy still hasn't emerged unscathed from the wave of bad press that has blamed it, these last few years, for hormone imbalances and health problems ranging from thyroid dysfunction to Alzheimer's disease to gynecomastia (aka man-boobs). My doctor, an anti-big-pharma, pro-nutrition kind of guy, always rails against tofu because it's a processed food. And seriously: How much of whatever is essential about the soybean really reaches you once it has been soaked for 16-plus hours, ground, boiled repeatedly to make it into milk, mixed with coagulants, curdled and drained? The preferred coagulant among major tofu manufacturers is calcium sulfate, aka gypsum, which is the main ingredient in plaster-of-Paris.

Unlike tofu, the next big thing can be whipped up in any household kitchen rather easily, for super-cheap. I've made some of the next big thing myself. More on that later, but to construct a high-protein, low-fat pound of it cost me 98 cents.

The next big thing is not actually new. It's been around for over 1,000 years, having been developed by Buddhist monks in Asia who knew about tofu but sought other alternatives in accordance with the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, in which the Buddha tells the Bodhisattva Kashyapa: "Those who keep close company with me must not eat meat. Even if, in a gesture of faith, almsgivers provide them with meat, they must shrink from it as they would shrink from the flesh of their own children" — because, the Buddha asserted, "eating meat destroys the attitude of great compassion." In China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the next big thing is ubiquitous, fashioned into astounding facsimiles such as mock duck and goose with stippled "skin."

The next big thing — which got its big 20th-century boost from the macrobiotic movement, whose pioneer George Ohsawa gave this ancient food a new Japanese name meaning "protein-made" — is called seitan, pronounced not "Satan" but "say-tahn." The good news is that it's not made of soy, nor any substance preschoolers use to make handprint plaques, but of wheat gluten.

The bad news is that it's made of wheat gluten.

It's the next big thing, and we will see a lot more of it as word spreads about its versatility and uncanny meatishness. Yet millions of people, were they to taste even a mouthful of the next big thing, would become seriously sick. A coworker of mine, who like the rest of those millions is gluten-intolerant, would have diarrhea for days.

But more about the good news. Culinary Institute of America graduate Steve Seligman gave me a tour of the USDA-standard industrial kitchen in Berkeley, California where his Savvy Savories seitan products — which include cutlets, Italian- and Louisiana-style "sausages," and "Stir-ins" flavored to replace meat in the cuisines of various cultures — are made. We watched workers preparing wet and dry ingredients to be kneaded inside a shiny columnar Hobart machine that Seligman adapted for this task because "it's such a pain in the neck to make seitan by hand." Seitan can be created shortcut-style by adding liquid to vital wheat gluten, a silky powder from which all the grain's starches have already been removed. But making seitan in the labor-intensive traditional manner means starting with ordinary flour and gradually washing away its starch via the lengthy and strenuous process of kneading the dough underwater; every time it clouds, the water is discarded and replaced until, even after kneading, it stays clear.